I enjoyed the post! However, I'm not sure your argument that "At best, feminists speak for a bare majority of American women" is especially relevant to efforts to make EA specifically more inclusive to women. In the US at least, support for feminism is very strongly associated with politics and education - the Pew poll you linked shows that 42% of Republican-leaning women would say feminist describes them somewhat or very well, vs. 75% of Democratic-leaning women. For educational attainment, it's 54% for women who did not attend college vs. 72% for women who did. (The Ipsos poll with the stronger criteria shows similar trends - 48% of democratic women identify as feminists, vs 13% of republican women). Polling on college campuses seems to show an even stronger trend, the one poll I could quickly find showed 78% of women in college identifying as feminists https://web.archive.org/web/20151124015741/https://www.hercampus.com/life/hcs-feminism-campus-survey-2015#feminism
We know from the EA survey (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wtQ3XCL35uxjXpwjE/ea-survey-2019-series-community-demographics-and) that engaged EAs are extraordinarily biased towards being young, left-leaning and college educated, with >90% of EAs either having a college degree or being in the process of obtaining one and 72% identifying as politically left of center vs. 3.5% identifying as right of center. Given those demographics, I think there's a strong case to be made that more like 3/4ths of women who might currently be potential EAs in the US are likely to be feminists.
Now I think there's a separate question of whether EA could try and be more appealing to conservatives and people without college degrees. But if one is interested in making EA more inclusive to women in the near future, I those general demographic trends are likely to be relevant
As an introverted autist with a severe psychometrics addiction, one thing I've been thinking about recently is what opportunities I could have to apply my survey skills to better understand social relations, particularly among people who are minorities among the demographics I interact with.
As such, I have considered doing surveys to better understand women's concerns and needs, and the application of making EA/rationalist spaces more inclusive to women seems like an interesting place to investigate.
My immediate thought would be applying my currently-favorite set of methods. That is:
1. Make a qualitative survey among EA/rationalist women where I ask them to describe what they would like from the spaces and/or what challenges they face (encouraging them to mention both challenges that are obviously woman-specific and challenges that are more personal but which might turn out to be relevant for the research). I might also recruit non-EA/non-rationalist women for comparison, or filter non-EA/non-rationalist women who feel they would have an interest in rationalist/EA topics, and ask them for qualitative data, to better cover "potential members" and not just preexisting members (your Bell Curves Problem).
2. Based on that qualitative survey, create questions that assess the concerns the women bring up, and turn that into a quantitative/multiple-choice survey, to better characterize the distribution of women there are with the different concerns. Distribute that survey to EA/rationalist women, and again, maybe also some non-EA/non-rationalist women to have some comparison.
3. Do various types of analysis to characterize what sorts of concerns are common and how they might trade off against other concerns, characterizing the different women's perspectives.
Whenever I consider making these sorts of surveys, I always end up wondering to what extent my curiosity about the results is due to being a male-brained autistic introvert, that is, someone who doesn't interact much with people (introvert), is bad at understanding people (autistic), and in particular doesn't interact much with the demographic in question (male-brained), and therefore fails to see the obvious big picture that anyone involved in the subject would see. It does seem like something that _should_ be common knowledge. But it might be that most others might also be unsure about these sorts of questions? In which case, perhaps the survey would be worthwhile.
Even if the survey results will be obvious to most people, I might try to do it anyway to learn it for myself. But I would be curious to know if this is something anyone else would want to see, as it could help inform me whether it's worth making this survey (and similar surveys more generally).
I for one would be very interested in your results! I think it's very easy to generalize from "me and my six friends" to "women in general," and we should resist that temptation-- women are half of humanity!
I just had another thought, and while it's only tangentially related to your comment, I thought I might as well post it here:
I bet there are a lot of cases where men are wondering if something is "okay". For example, apparently recently on TPOT/ingroup twitter, there was a "tits or ass" meme going around (I feel like somehow I entirely missed it, but idk how), and e.g. Tim Blais expressed uncertainty about whether it was appropriate: https://twitter.com/MasterTimBlais/status/1624712253202132992
There's probably a lot of cases where men are uncertain about what is or is not appropriate behavior, so I should probably also have a qualitative survey where I ask men what things they are uncertain about. I can then take those uncertainties from men and turn them into questions for women, asking them how they would feel about such things.
I'll answer your hypothetical survey right now as an EA/rationalist woman.
What I want from those spaces that is currently a challenge for me is on-site childcare at meetups.
As a female who has reproduced, both the hormones and the logistics of pregnancy, natural birth, and breastfeeding have disposed me to greatly enjoy being the primary caregiver for my young children. However, that role means that my young kids and I tend to come as a package deal. It would be nice if meetups were held in a park or other child-friendly space, with a babysitter hired to watch everyone's kids, so the adults could talk. That is what I need to be able to attend basically any event regularly.
I'm not claiming this is an efficient use of funds, ethically necessary, etc. But to paint a picture for your data collection: this is my reality and the reality of many primary caregivers of young children, who are mostly women.
"For the love of God, do something about that thing where any conventionally attractive woman in a male-dominated space gets swarmed by six men hanging on her every word and conspicuously not hitting on her."
Uh-oh. Why do I suddenly hear the chorus to Taylor Swift's "Anti-Hero" in my head?
Anyway, having been the kind of person who would be on the male side of that kind of interaction, I can certainly imagine why it could become a problem even if every individual man is on his best behavior, but I don't know how to change the incentives so that "there are many lonely men that want the attention of one of a much smaller number of conventionally attractive women" doesn't turn into "any conventionally attractive woman who shows up becomes the object of more attention than she's comfortable dealing with".
I know some people have gotten very positive results from a "no hitting on people at meetups" rule (especially if people might run into each other in other contexts so it's not a "no hitting on people you meet in this context at all" rule).
I think that some individual guys can self-police to prevent glomming but I worry that encouraging self-policing will just make guys assume they can't talk to women at all.
I understand why rules like this are necessary. I've participated in several female-coded hobbies over the years, and I know what it's like to have endless conversations of the form, "Oh, you're a guy! Doing hobby X! That's so cool!" Nobody hit on me, and everyone was welcoming and polite. But that conversation is only fun the first dozen times. And attractive women presumably experience everything I did, plus inappropriate advances and maybe some genuinely scary behavior. So yes, the problem you describe is painfully real.
But there's another part of me that's exhausted by gender-based rules for interaction, no matter who's proposing them. Like, I am fine having a gender! But I am much less happy about statements of the form, "As gender X, you must/must not do Y." Like, I understand that we do not live in a utopia, and that such rules are an inevitable part of a heteronormative world. And certain social spaces can have heavily skewed gender ratios, which makes everything much trickier even among people with the best intentions.
But I've literally caught myself thinking, "Well, I spent like 30 minutes talking to X because she mentioned her thesis, and I was like, 'Cool, tell me more! Does that really work? Can a homomorphically encrypted database really do SQL-style aggregation?' And she explained, which was neat! Then I spent like two hours listening to Y explain Ricardian land rants, and I guess he's arguably one of the cuter people here, but he's a guy. And I kept talking with Z, but she was doing 70% of the work restarting the conversation whenever it naturally broke off. But it happily wasn't a flirty thing, because I'm mono and committed and half of the people here are probably poly. On the other hand, maybe 10% of the people here are women and I've spent at least 30% of the evening talking to them. So am I technically 'glomming'?"
I know that approximately none of this thought process is normal. Especially the part where I sincerely ask people about their research at parties, lol. (Although maybe people do that in the Valley?) But I don't enjoy devoting that much of my social-interaction headspace to a bunch of gender-based rules, even if some of them are probably necessary. And pretty sure this sort of social second-guessing hits diminishing returns quickly.
Is there supposed to be a difference between "conspicuously not hitting on her" and *actually* not hitting on her (assuming "her" is someone you do find very attractive)?
Thank you so much for posting this. It's a concise writeup of some points that badly need to be made.
The closest thing I've previously seen was https://medium.com/@maradydd/okay-feminism-its-time-we-had-a-talk-about-empathy-bd6321c66b37, but this is much more tightly organized.
I enjoyed the post! However, I'm not sure your argument that "At best, feminists speak for a bare majority of American women" is especially relevant to efforts to make EA specifically more inclusive to women. In the US at least, support for feminism is very strongly associated with politics and education - the Pew poll you linked shows that 42% of Republican-leaning women would say feminist describes them somewhat or very well, vs. 75% of Democratic-leaning women. For educational attainment, it's 54% for women who did not attend college vs. 72% for women who did. (The Ipsos poll with the stronger criteria shows similar trends - 48% of democratic women identify as feminists, vs 13% of republican women). Polling on college campuses seems to show an even stronger trend, the one poll I could quickly find showed 78% of women in college identifying as feminists https://web.archive.org/web/20151124015741/https://www.hercampus.com/life/hcs-feminism-campus-survey-2015#feminism
We know from the EA survey (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wtQ3XCL35uxjXpwjE/ea-survey-2019-series-community-demographics-and) that engaged EAs are extraordinarily biased towards being young, left-leaning and college educated, with >90% of EAs either having a college degree or being in the process of obtaining one and 72% identifying as politically left of center vs. 3.5% identifying as right of center. Given those demographics, I think there's a strong case to be made that more like 3/4ths of women who might currently be potential EAs in the US are likely to be feminists.
Now I think there's a separate question of whether EA could try and be more appealing to conservatives and people without college degrees. But if one is interested in making EA more inclusive to women in the near future, I those general demographic trends are likely to be relevant
As an introverted autist with a severe psychometrics addiction, one thing I've been thinking about recently is what opportunities I could have to apply my survey skills to better understand social relations, particularly among people who are minorities among the demographics I interact with.
As such, I have considered doing surveys to better understand women's concerns and needs, and the application of making EA/rationalist spaces more inclusive to women seems like an interesting place to investigate.
My immediate thought would be applying my currently-favorite set of methods. That is:
1. Make a qualitative survey among EA/rationalist women where I ask them to describe what they would like from the spaces and/or what challenges they face (encouraging them to mention both challenges that are obviously woman-specific and challenges that are more personal but which might turn out to be relevant for the research). I might also recruit non-EA/non-rationalist women for comparison, or filter non-EA/non-rationalist women who feel they would have an interest in rationalist/EA topics, and ask them for qualitative data, to better cover "potential members" and not just preexisting members (your Bell Curves Problem).
2. Based on that qualitative survey, create questions that assess the concerns the women bring up, and turn that into a quantitative/multiple-choice survey, to better characterize the distribution of women there are with the different concerns. Distribute that survey to EA/rationalist women, and again, maybe also some non-EA/non-rationalist women to have some comparison.
3. Do various types of analysis to characterize what sorts of concerns are common and how they might trade off against other concerns, characterizing the different women's perspectives.
Whenever I consider making these sorts of surveys, I always end up wondering to what extent my curiosity about the results is due to being a male-brained autistic introvert, that is, someone who doesn't interact much with people (introvert), is bad at understanding people (autistic), and in particular doesn't interact much with the demographic in question (male-brained), and therefore fails to see the obvious big picture that anyone involved in the subject would see. It does seem like something that _should_ be common knowledge. But it might be that most others might also be unsure about these sorts of questions? In which case, perhaps the survey would be worthwhile.
Even if the survey results will be obvious to most people, I might try to do it anyway to learn it for myself. But I would be curious to know if this is something anyone else would want to see, as it could help inform me whether it's worth making this survey (and similar surveys more generally).
I for one would be very interested in your results! I think it's very easy to generalize from "me and my six friends" to "women in general," and we should resist that temptation-- women are half of humanity!
I just had another thought, and while it's only tangentially related to your comment, I thought I might as well post it here:
I bet there are a lot of cases where men are wondering if something is "okay". For example, apparently recently on TPOT/ingroup twitter, there was a "tits or ass" meme going around (I feel like somehow I entirely missed it, but idk how), and e.g. Tim Blais expressed uncertainty about whether it was appropriate: https://twitter.com/MasterTimBlais/status/1624712253202132992
There's probably a lot of cases where men are uncertain about what is or is not appropriate behavior, so I should probably also have a qualitative survey where I ask men what things they are uncertain about. I can then take those uncertainties from men and turn them into questions for women, asking them how they would feel about such things.
I'll answer your hypothetical survey right now as an EA/rationalist woman.
What I want from those spaces that is currently a challenge for me is on-site childcare at meetups.
As a female who has reproduced, both the hormones and the logistics of pregnancy, natural birth, and breastfeeding have disposed me to greatly enjoy being the primary caregiver for my young children. However, that role means that my young kids and I tend to come as a package deal. It would be nice if meetups were held in a park or other child-friendly space, with a babysitter hired to watch everyone's kids, so the adults could talk. That is what I need to be able to attend basically any event regularly.
I'm not claiming this is an efficient use of funds, ethically necessary, etc. But to paint a picture for your data collection: this is my reality and the reality of many primary caregivers of young children, who are mostly women.
I'm a woman and would be a fan of that I think. Women aren't mysterious; all you have to do is ask us.
"For the love of God, do something about that thing where any conventionally attractive woman in a male-dominated space gets swarmed by six men hanging on her every word and conspicuously not hitting on her."
Uh-oh. Why do I suddenly hear the chorus to Taylor Swift's "Anti-Hero" in my head?
Anyway, having been the kind of person who would be on the male side of that kind of interaction, I can certainly imagine why it could become a problem even if every individual man is on his best behavior, but I don't know how to change the incentives so that "there are many lonely men that want the attention of one of a much smaller number of conventionally attractive women" doesn't turn into "any conventionally attractive woman who shows up becomes the object of more attention than she's comfortable dealing with".
I know some people have gotten very positive results from a "no hitting on people at meetups" rule (especially if people might run into each other in other contexts so it's not a "no hitting on people you meet in this context at all" rule).
I think that some individual guys can self-police to prevent glomming but I worry that encouraging self-policing will just make guys assume they can't talk to women at all.
I understand why rules like this are necessary. I've participated in several female-coded hobbies over the years, and I know what it's like to have endless conversations of the form, "Oh, you're a guy! Doing hobby X! That's so cool!" Nobody hit on me, and everyone was welcoming and polite. But that conversation is only fun the first dozen times. And attractive women presumably experience everything I did, plus inappropriate advances and maybe some genuinely scary behavior. So yes, the problem you describe is painfully real.
But there's another part of me that's exhausted by gender-based rules for interaction, no matter who's proposing them. Like, I am fine having a gender! But I am much less happy about statements of the form, "As gender X, you must/must not do Y." Like, I understand that we do not live in a utopia, and that such rules are an inevitable part of a heteronormative world. And certain social spaces can have heavily skewed gender ratios, which makes everything much trickier even among people with the best intentions.
But I've literally caught myself thinking, "Well, I spent like 30 minutes talking to X because she mentioned her thesis, and I was like, 'Cool, tell me more! Does that really work? Can a homomorphically encrypted database really do SQL-style aggregation?' And she explained, which was neat! Then I spent like two hours listening to Y explain Ricardian land rants, and I guess he's arguably one of the cuter people here, but he's a guy. And I kept talking with Z, but she was doing 70% of the work restarting the conversation whenever it naturally broke off. But it happily wasn't a flirty thing, because I'm mono and committed and half of the people here are probably poly. On the other hand, maybe 10% of the people here are women and I've spent at least 30% of the evening talking to them. So am I technically 'glomming'?"
I know that approximately none of this thought process is normal. Especially the part where I sincerely ask people about their research at parties, lol. (Although maybe people do that in the Valley?) But I don't enjoy devoting that much of my social-interaction headspace to a bunch of gender-based rules, even if some of them are probably necessary. And pretty sure this sort of social second-guessing hits diminishing returns quickly.
Is there supposed to be a difference between "conspicuously not hitting on her" and *actually* not hitting on her (assuming "her" is someone you do find very attractive)?
> At best, feminist speak for a bare majority of American women.
Typo, should be "feminists".